If you’ve ever felt a burning sensation in your muscles during a vigorous workout or physical labor, you know what lactic acid feel like. Lactic acid is how the body tells you it’s time to take a break before you cause some damage. The smart move at that point is to take a break and allow your lymphatic system to clear out the toxins.

New research summarized in the New York Times recently suggests that your brain cells need the same kind of opportunity to clear out all the waste they generate in the course of a day of thinking. The research shows that 20 percent of a brain’s total volume is dedicated to channels that remove the toxins that accumulate over the course of thinking all day. The primary time those channels have a chance to work is when you’re sleeping.

The occasional all-nighter isn’t going to do much damage over the long run, but sustained nights with less than seven to nine hours of sound sleep can have some serious short term and, the research suggests, long term effects.

In the short run, you’re not going to think as clearly and your decision-making suffers. In the long run, the toxins that build up in your brain are the same ones that lead to degenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.

You can’t be very mindful when your brain is exhausted. If you’re getting less than seven or eight hours of sleep most nights, why not make a move in the right direction by adding 30 minutes on average this coming week and see what difference it makes? Learn more about how to do it from the National Sleep Foundation.

How much sleep do you get most nights? What’s helping or hurting your average? What difference is it making to you?

Executive coach Scott Eblin’s goal is to help you succeed at the next level of leadership. Throughout the week, he’ll offer his take on the leadership lessons in the news and his advice on your most pressing leadership questions. A former government executive, Scott is a graduate of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and is the author of The Next Level: What Insiders Know About Executive Success.

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Database-level encryption had its origins in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to very basic risks which largely revolved around the theft of servers, backup tapes and other physical-layer assets. As noted in Verizon’s 2014, Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR)1, threats today are far more advanced and dangerous.

In order to better understand the current state of external and internal-facing agency workplace applications, Government Business Council (GBC) and Riverbed undertook an in-depth research study of federal employees. Overall, survey findings indicate that federal IT applications still face a gamut of challenges with regard to quality, reliability, and performance management.

PIV- I And Multifactor Authentication: The Best Defense for Federal Government Contractors

This white paper explores NIST SP 800-171 and why compliance is critical to federal government contractors, especially those that work with the Department of Defense, as well as how leveraging PIV-I credentialing with multifactor authentication can be used as a defense against cyberattacks

This research study aims to understand how state and local leaders regard their agency’s innovation efforts and what they are doing to overcome the challenges they face in successfully implementing these efforts.

The U.S. healthcare industry is rapidly moving away from traditional fee-for-service models and towards value-based purchasing that reimburses physicians for quality of care in place of frequency of care.